Page 18 of Lord Carlisle's Enticing Lure
Clive rose fromthe table outside the sweet shop. Langley must have some emergency with his contact. Their plan, should one be unable to meet, was to do so the following day. Same time, same place.
He could wait. His agent out of Broadstairs had failed to post. So Clive had no news for his friend and colleague.
“Lord Carlisle?” A lady stepped before him. “How lovely to see you here.”
Amber duClare, Lady Ramsey, extended her hand in greeting. A gorgeous creature with sizzling red hair and snapping green eyes, she and her friend Augustine Whittington, Lady Ashley, were noted society hostesses.
“My lady,” he said as he took her hand. “You make my day sunnier.”
“Charmer,” she teased him, and cocked a brow. “Have you met my friend, Lady Ashley? My dear,” she said, and turned to the young woman beside her, “allow me to present Lord Carlisle, Clive Davenport.”
The dark-haired beauty was smiling. “I have often heard of your work in the Lords for voting reforms, sir. I am honored to meet you.”
“As am I to formally meet you. Have you ladies a desire for the crumpets?” Both ladies were friends, Clive had long known. Married to men who were not only friends themselves, but colleagues, so said rumor. Clive had met Lady Ramsey only a few weeks ago in London at a reception at the Russian embassy. There he’d also exchanged a few words with her husband, said to be an agent, as was his wife, for the famous city merchant Scarlett Hawthorne.
The Scarlett ring was unofficial and frowned upon by the home and foreign secretaries. The prime minister could not confirm Scarlett’s agents’ success with any hard evidence, nor with any regularity. A problem of merchant trade and agents’ lack of temperance, he termed it. Yet he valued Scarlett’s work when he could confirm its accuracy. He declared that the government needed all the help they could get to smother the bastard, Napoleon. Bound as the PM was by what he knew and what he wished he could learn, he often decreed that a secret was only that if two people knew it. He chided his official ministers to live up to the reported rumors of the lady merchant’s smart network. She sat in the City in Clements Lane, but her elegant fingertips controlled strings on innumerable agents that reached as far as Cairo, Jappa, Athens, and, said some, perhaps even the ruthlessly ruled kingdoms of Tripoli and the tribes of Africa who miraculously escaped the horror of the sub-Sahara slave trade.
Clive smiled and tipped his hat to the two ladies. “I do recommend everything here, however.”
“You are leaving?” Lady Ramsey’s eyes swept over his empty plate and cup and saucer.
“I am.” He made to go.
“We could sit, couldn’t we, Gus, and become better acquainted?”
“I apologize, but I must leave.” He wished to heaven he could stay and learn what he could about why they were here in town, if indeed there was a reason other than the pleasure of the moment. “I have another appointment, you see.”
“A shame. Well!” Lady Ramsey said with a bright smile. “My husband and I host a ball in the grand salon of the Old Ship Hotel three evenings’ hence. Please come. I will send round a proper invitation. Where do you lodge?”
He grinned. “The Old Ship.”
“There you have it!” She beamed. “You can simply run down the stairs. I know Godfrey would love to get to know you better.”
“And my husband, Lord Ashley, would as well,” Lady Ashley added.
Because the foreign secretary had long wished that his own agents would coordinate espionage activities with those of Scarlett Hawthorne, Clive thought it the perfect opportunity to draw closer to a few. “Thank you, I would like that myself. I will be delighted to attend.”
He was making to leave them with a nod when Madame Giselle Laurant turned the corner of the bakery shop and halted at sight of the two ladies with him.
Her eyelashes flickered, the only sign of her distress. Her gaze on the two women, she proceeded to walk backward out of sight.
What was wrong?
He bade both ladies good day and took the lane straight before him. As he passed the corner into which madame had retreated, he noted from the corner of his eye that she had disappeared.
The obvious answer was that she knew Lady Ramsey and/or Lady Ashley, and did not wish to speak with them.
Why? What was her fear of being discovered by those two ladies?
He hurried back to his rooms. He had a report to write for Foreign Secretary Mulgrave.
His questions about Madame Laurant had to wait until later. Better yet, this business in the Lanes warned that he should forget her.
But recent attempts throughout his days and nights said that was not so.
*
Giselle sank intothe hollow crevice behind the corner of two shops. That had been close to disaster. She had covered her shock at Gus and Amber’s early arrival in town, and properly so.
